Machine Learning Engineer I/II, Applied AI
Lila Sciences11 hours ago
Cambridge, MA, USA or San Francisco, CA, USAEntry Level / Mid Level
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$116k - $170k/yr
Responsibilities
- Close the gap between Lila AI model capabilities and customer-specific scientific workflows.
- Post-train models using SFT, DPO, PPO, and GRPO approaches.
- Build evaluation loops, metrics, and test sets for model quality, reliability, and customer fit.
- Design experiments and feed customer learnings, data signals, and evaluation results into model improvement cycles.
- Partner with AI researchers and software teams to move model capabilities into production-quality workflows.
- Debug model failures using traces, evaluations, customer context, scientific feedback, data, and logs.
- Build reusable tooling for model adaptation, evaluation, and deployment workflows.
Requirements
- Experience building, training, adapting, or evaluating machine learning models.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow.
- Experience designing experiments, evaluation metrics, or test sets for model performance.
- Ability to debug model behavior using data, traces, logs, and qualitative feedback.
- Experience collaborating across research and engineering teams to deliver usable ML systems.
- Familiarity with large language models, multimodal models, or agentic AI systems.
- Clear communication skills for translating customer needs into technical model improvements.
- Preferred experience includes production or customer-facing model adaptation, scientific or data-intensive use cases, evaluation harnesses, model monitoring, quality dashboards, RAG, tool use, agentic workflows, RL post-training, MoE architectures, and collaboration with product or customer-facing teams.
Benefits
- Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer-paid life and disability insurance, flexible time off, company-wide holidays, paid parental leave, educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
- Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive regionally tailored benefits.
- The role offers bonus potential and early-stage equity.
- The position is full-time; compensation and benefits vary by location.
Categories
About Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences builds an AI-driven research platform and autonomous lab systems for life science, chemistry, and materials R&D teams. Its products combine large AI models with robotic instruments to plan, run, and analyze experiments, integrating into customer-specific scientific workflows. The privately held company serves pharma, materials, and energy organizations and is venture-backed, including a Series A financing in 2025.